Challenging the idea of the public intellectual as a social media researcher

The HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series 2021

Speaker: Babacar Faye (HUMA, University of Cape Town, South Africa) 

Why is online religious radicalism on the rise in Senegal? While wanting to critique the false idea that Digital Humanities research methods are only practicable in western technologically advanced countries, this presentation will talk about the emerging Digital Humanities/online socialities in Senegal and the unreadiness, unpreparedness, if not reluctancy, of Senegalese academics to critically engage thereon. Senegal’s political project to turn its back to colonialism and rewrite its national history has widely been hailed as a positive/decolonial move. Yet, the project was “disrupted” and halted due to heated criticism from some religious communities who were against the ways in which the historians have objectively engaged the histories and popular narratives of their forefathers. In addition to this social outcry – of what it is believed to be a desacralizing methodology of rewriting the history of the nation’s religious brotherhoods –, there has emerged what we call “cyber-radicalism” in Senegalese social media platforms. With the radically de-territorialized spaces of online intersubjectivities, I am interested in the novel ways of public engagement and the “new” role of the intellectual in social media, whereby bringing to the fore the tensions between hierarchy versus equality, passion version distance, and the individual versus the collective.

About the speaker: Babacar Faye is a Postdoctoral Fellow at HUMA at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a PhD from the University Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal, a Master's in American Cultural Studies from Bowling Green State University, United States and a Master's in Intercultural Mediations, Identities, Mobilities, and Conflicts from the University of Lille, France. He has a solid academic background in intercultural mediation and conflict resolution. Babacar has been the Interim Academic Director of the School for International Training (SIT) Study Abroad programs in Senegal, "Senegal: Global Security and Religious Pluralism" and "Senegal: Hip Hop, African Diaspora and Decolonial Futures". At HUMA, his research focuses on new social movements in the post-industrial West and the decolonial African context, focusing on the role of social media and hip-hop as a medium to effectuate political change globally. More